The polite Boston partner, who, if he were in want of a customer, would almost persuade a man with two good legs to provide himself with a third, carried us to the back part of the building, where legs are organized.

The willow, which furnishes the charcoal for the gunpowder that blows off limbs, is the wood chosen to supply the loss it has helped to occasion.  It is light, strong, does not warp or “check” much as many other woods, and is, as the workmen say, healthy, that is, not irritating to the parts with which it is in contact.  Whether the salicine it may contain enters the pores and invigorates the system may be a question for those who remember the drugs in the Sultan’s bat-handle and the remarkable cure they wrought.  This wood is kept in a dry-house with as much care as that intended for the manufacture of pianos.  It is thoroughly steamed also, before using.

The wood comes in rudely shaped blocks, as lasts are sent to the factory, seeming to have been coarsely hewed out of the log.  The shaping, as we found to our surprise, is all done by hand.  We had expected to see great lathes, worked by steam-power, taking in a rough stick and turning out a finished limb.  But it is shaped very much as a sculptor finishes his marble, with an eye to artistic effect,—­not so much in the view of the stranger, who does not look upon its naked loveliness, as in that of the wearer, who is seduced by its harmonious outlines into its purchase, and solaced with the consciousness that he carries so much beauty and symmetry about with him.  The hollowing-out of the interior is done by wicked-looking blades and scoops at the end of long stems, suggesting the thought of dentists’ instruments as they might have been in the days of the giants.  The joints are most carefully made, more particularly at the knee, where a strong bolt of steel passes through the solid wood.  Windows, oblong openings, are left in the sides of the limb, to insure a good supply of air to the extremity of the mutilated limb.  Many persons are not aware that all parts of the surface breathe just as the lungs breathe, exhaling carbonic acid as well as water, and taking in more or less oxygen.

One of the workmen, a pleasant-looking young fellow, was himself, we were told, a ligniped.  We begged him to give us a specimen of his walking.  He arose and walked rather slowly across the room and back.  “Once more,” we said, not feeling quite sure which was Nature’s leg and which Mr. Palmer’s.  So he walked up and down the room again, until we had satisfied ourselves which was the leg of willow and which that of flesh and bone.  It is not, perhaps, to the credit of our eyes or observing powers, but it is a fact, that we deliberately selected the wrong leg.  No victim of the thimble-rigger’s trickery was ever more completely taken in than we were by the contrivance of the ingenious Surgeon-Artist.